


Find Eyes to See the Bright of Day

by tosca1390



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-01
Updated: 2013-06-01
Packaged: 2017-12-13 16:44:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/826508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tosca1390/pseuds/tosca1390
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That first night of blissfully exhausted sleep was an anomaly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Find Eyes to See the Bright of Day

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2011.

*

That first night of blissfully exhausted sleep was an anomaly.

Harry woke up to find Ron and Hermione in the four-poster next to him, not touching whatsoever except for their fingertips, curled around each other’s. He sat up, reaching for his glasses from the familiar bedside table; the room was quite warm. Yesterday’s clothes stuck to him uncomfortably, still smelling of curses and blood and dirt. 

The stone floor was cool under his feet as he walked to the window and drew the heavy curtains aside. Outside, the lawn still smoked, and he imagined he could see blood on the grass. People wandered small and indistinct around the grounds; he felt a sort of anxiety, restlessness, as he watched them. 

_What now?_ He thought, a weird heavy feeling settling in his stomach.

*

A week later, Harry sat in the Minister for Magic’s office, eyes fixed on Kingsley Shacklebolt. 

“It’s quite the exception, to bring you in without the proper tests,” Kingsley was saying. His face still carried faint remainders of wounds from the last battle. He, like all of the surviving members of the resistance, had been working on all cylinders to bring stability and sanity back into the Wizarding World, and the efforts showed. “The Aurors require top scores from all their recruits.”

It was so bizarrely official, after years of chaos; Harry wanted to laugh. “But?”

A sharp slice of a smile curved Kingsley’s mouth. “In light of your efforts during the war—indeed, yours and Ron’s and Hermione’s, if you are so inclined towards entering Auror training, you would all be granted exemptions through this office.”

Harry breathed in; sometimes he thought he could still smell Umbridge’s perfume, cloying and stomach-turning. “Ron and I want to, but Hermione hasn’t made up her mind yet,” he said. “What about the others?”

“The others?”

He set his jaw. “Neville, and Seamus, and Parvati—all the seventh years. They were cheated out of a real year, just as we were. They fought just as we did. If they want an exemption, they should get it too. It wasn’t just me,” he said fervently. The weight hadn’t been all his.

Kingsley frowned. “If they approach us, they will be given exemptions as well.”

Harry exhaled. “Good.”

“I wasn’t singling you out for special favors, Harry. It’s only that you’re the first of anyone to approach us. It’s only been a week,” Kingsley added, an odd sort of appraisal in his gaze that Harry desperately wanted to avoid. 

“I was only—I just wanted to be certain,” Harry mumbled. 

Nodding, Kingsley plucked a stack of parchments from the top of one of the piles on his desk and handed it across to Harry. “Here are the official applications. You and Ron need to fill them out and return them directly to me as soon as possible. I’ll get your exemption paperwork filed immediately.”

“Thank you, sir,” Harry said, the parchment thick and heavy in his hands. 

Kingsley leaned back in his chair, looking suddenly quite weary. “I’ve heard you’ve made a substantial donation to Hogwarts, to help with the repair work.”

A flush curled along Harry’s neck. He had stood in front of his Gringotts vault a few days ago, his parents’ money and Sirius’s laid out in front of him, and had been overwhelmed by a smothering sensation. It was all his, and shouldn’t have been; so he’d given a part of it away, to the place that had been his home more than anywhere else. “Yeah. I thought—I thought it was only right,” he said, that choking sensation settling in his chest.

The Minister looked at him for a long moment, his face softening. “You’re a good man, Harry,” he said quietly. “I’m glad to have you with us”

*

“You look terrible.”

Sitting under the hard blue summer sky, Harry didn’t look away from his orientation papers. “Thanks.”

With a sigh, Ginny settled down on the grass next to him. From far away, the noises of the Burrow were softened, just faint in the background. It was June now; he’d been with the Weasleys since leaving Hogwarts for the last time. With Ron and Hermione gone to find Hermione’s parents in Australia, he was left truly alone for the first time in years. The joy at the end of the fighting had been tempered with deep pervasive grief. Every night, he wandered from corridor to corridor, sleepless and haunted. 

“I mean it,” she said, nudging her shoulder against his. 

He looked over at her, the soft fall of her hair, the freckles that stood out too strongly against her pale face. They hadn’t been this close since Fred’s funeral, when she’d grasped his hand for five solid minutes; now he could trace the map of her freckles across her skin, as he’d used to at Hogwarts, a lifetime ago. Now she looked about as rested as he felt, really. In the night, he could hear her pacing the floorboards of her own room. But she was valiant in her determined (sometimes faltering) buoyancy during the day. Whether it was for her benefit or her family’s, he couldn’t be sure. But he appreciated it. 

“I know,” he said finally.

She watched him carefully; he had to look away, the back of his neck burning. “Mum’s worried for you.”

He swallowed hard. “I’m fine.”

“You’ve got a load of owl post waiting for you,” she said.

“I know. I’ll get to it,” he said, fingers clenching in the summer grass. The press requests hadn’t let up in the month since the end; he couldn’t stomach going through any of them.

She sighed, her limbs casting a shadow across his. “Dad said you and Ron are on track for Auror training in August.”

Looking back down at the parchment spread across his lap, he nodded. “Yeah. There’s a lot to remember,” he murmured. The lists of potions and charms and spells he had to have ready at the drop of a hat were overwhelming, especially since he’d never had Hermione’s capacity for sheer knowledge. Every success he’d had was stumbled into and upon, sometimes despite his better efforts. 

Ginny was quiet for a long moment. Then, her hand slipped to his forearm, resting lightly. “I could help you revise?” she offered softly. 

He glanced at her, heart hammering in the back of his throat. There was nothing accusatory in her gaze. Her face was as open as it always had been to him, the lines around her mouth and eyes drooping faintly with her remaining grief. “I could use the help,” he said after a minute. 

She nodded. “What are friends for, after all?” she said with a small smile. 

Part of him wanted to press on, all his thoughts fixed on _friends_ ; he didn’t want to remain there, that much he knew. But in the stillness of the summer day, in the yard of his adopted home away from Hogwarts (his real home), he just nodded and returned the smile. He couldn’t think that far, that deeply ahead; not now, with so much left unresolved behind him.

*

Andromeda and Tonks shared the same smile, and it haunted Harry in his sleep. 

He wouldn’t say a word about it to anyone, of course. But every time he had Teddy in his arms, with every weekly visit, feeling Andromeda’s wary gaze watching his every move, he held himself apart. He had to, to keep from feeling quite lost. 

July sun crept through the filmy white curtains of Andromeda’s sitting room. No dust reflected in the air, no haphazard toys or a book out of place; it was quite opposite from the Burrow, from the tent that Hermione had tried so desperately to make some kind of home, and the stillness unsettled him. 

His mind was full of revising Potions and Charms, all the small minutiae from Hogwarts that he’d lost moving from campsite to campsite, when his mind was full of Hallows and horcruxes and death. Even miles away, he could hear Ginny’s soft voice repeating ingredients and steps to Polyjuice Potion and Sleeping Draught. If he had been there now, she would be sitting very close at the kitchen table, her bare arm against his, Ron glancing between them with a weird look—

“He likes you,” Andromeda said, interrupting his jumping thoughts. Still clothed in black, she was stiff-backed, but soft around the eyes and mouth; he could see the weight of her grief there. 

Harry couldn’t help but redden, setting Teddy on his knee. “He’s very… quiet,” he said finally, his hands spanning the boy’s small torso to steady him. “I reckoned he’d be loud, or something. But he’s quiet.”

“So are you, Harry.”

Her gaze pierced him straight through, and he swallowed hard, keeping his eyes to Teddy’s vibrantly red hair. “I’m not a big talker,” he said after a moment. “The speech from the battle, all that—it was the adrenaline.”

“I don’t mean that,” she said, waving her hand impatiently. “Are you going to talk to someone about all this?”

A weird _something_ curled up and took residence in his stomach. “Someone?”

She watched him carefully, with a penetrating gaze, assessing him. It echoed what he’d seen in Bellatrix Lestrange—in that moment, he saw the family resemblance. “A mental health professional.”

He flushed, mouth dry. “I reckon that wouldn’t look very good to a lot of people.”

“I don’t believe that should really matter. You’ve been through quite an ordeal over the last seventeen years,” she said archly, with that maternal steeliness that only Mrs. Weasley could match. “You’ll drive yourself crazy if you don’t talk to someone.”

“I’m starting Auror training in a few weeks,” he murmured, throat tightening. “I can’t—I can’t have anything get in the way of that.”

Her brow furrowed. “Then I would very much suggest speaking to someone, or else you may have larger issues in the future.”

Teddy hiccuped, and Harry brought him in closer to his chest. “I don’t know if I have anything to say yet,” he said slowly, as Teddy fisted his tiny fingers into the cotton of his button-down shirt. 

Andromeda sighed. “If you change your mind, I am available.”

At that, he glanced up in surprise. “I’m sorry?”

“I didn’t putter around a house for twenty-odd years, Harry. I was trained at St. Mungo’s, I have a profession. Granted, I’ve had to be selective of my clients, due to some members of my family and their infamy, but I am a certified professional in the field. I would be quite happy to assist you,” she said. 

He swallowed thickly. Teddy cooed and thumped his little fists against Harry’s chest. “Well—I’ll—I’ll think about it,” Harry said haltingly. 

“I think you should,” she said, gentleness rounding her words. “Auror training won’t be breezy. Nyphmadora, as talented as she was, struggled before and after Alastor took her on. You won’t have him there.”

“I didn’t think it would be easy. I’m not looking for that,” he said, color rising on his face. 

She made a quiet sound and sipped her tea. The summer air lay thick and silent between them, with only Teddy’s nonsensical sounds to break the quiet. He looked down at Teddy, whose hair was a brilliant sheen of purple now. A memory of Tonks laughing with Sirius in Grimmauld Place struck him hard; he clenched his jaw, shutting his eyes for a moment. 

Abruptly, she cleared her throat and set her tea on the side table next to her straight-backed chair. “Harry, I’ve known you a short time, but I doubt you’ve ever looked for anything easy in your entire life, even when you could or should have,” she said. “I only mean to give you some advice, which you may of course ignore.”

He smoothed his hand down Teddy’s hair and back, meeting her gaze. “I know. I’ll think about it, I will,” he said quietly.

“Good,” she said, smiling faintly. His chest clenched once more. 

*

The summer waxed on, little spots of events interrupting his solemn routine. Hermione’s family coming back from Australia prompted a dinner party; Harry didn’t think he’d ever seen Hermione smile so widely and freely. His own birthday was a small affair; instead of Mrs. Weasley slaving away in the small stuffy kitchen of the Burrow, as she usually did, he decided to take them all out for dinner in Muggle London. It was the best birthday he could remember; even George joined them, though he drank a little much for Mrs. Weasley’s taste. But for the look on Mr. Weasley’s face, the utter pleasure they all felt among a world that could have been lost, it was completely worthwhile.

During his sleepless nights, he revised and prepared for the beginning of Auror training. It kept him from thinking of ghosts left behind in the Forbidden Forest, of lives half-lived. Though everyone from the _Daily Prophet_ to the Ministry requested public appearances and statements, he remained silent, hiding in his borrowed room at the Burrow. The only forward movement he made was to go to Grimmauld Place, to see about putting it to rights. 

“But you don’t want to actually _live_ there, do you Harry?” Hermione asked one night in early August, the air filmy and sticky against their skin. He sat in the garden with her, Ron, Ginny, and George, who’d come over for dinner at Mrs. Weasley’s pressing. 

“Why wouldn’t I?” he said, tilting his head back to look up into the star-dotted sky. “It’s mine.”

“It shouldn’t just sit there,” Ron joined in, his arm tucked safely across Hermione’s shoulders. 

She frowned faintly, still a little too thin in the face from their months on the run. “It needs so much work. And all those—well, who knows what you’d end up finding—it’s going to be full of ghosts, Harry. Ghosts and memories.”

“What, like the rest of our lives aren’t?” George asked then, his voice thick and edged with firewhiskey. 

They looked at him, sitting at the head of the picnic table. In the faint yellow light from the kitchen, he looked pale but steady, his fingers curved around a short, stout, half-full glass. “You don’t see me running off from the flat I shared with Fred, do you? Or shutting the doors of the joke shop?”

Sitting at Harry’s feet on the grass, Ginny started. Harry could feel the tension thrumming off her bare skin. He kept his gaze on George, his breathing stuttered in his chest. It felt as if he was swimming up from one of his dreams, his parents’ gazes and the image of Sirius’s falling body stuck to him like paste.

George sipped at his whiskey, sighing. “I thought about it. Reckoned it wouldn’t be the same, without him. But then I reckoned he’d hex me into eternity if I did. I don’t doubt he could come back to do it, too.”

“Oh, George,” Hermione said softly. 

The five of them were quiet for a long moment. Harry shut his eyes and tilted his head up towards the sky, wishing for a breeze. He felt Ginny’s slim callused fingers curl over his bare ankle, a reassuring grip. There were so many telling absences in their lives; he wondered if any of them would sleep a full night again. 

Suddenly, George chuckled and grinned faintly. “Now that you all feel sufficiently bad for me, who wants to open the shop for me tomorrow morning?”

Ron snorted, and even Hermione smiled. Ginny’s grip slipped from Harry; he breathed out silently, ribs pressing in hard on his heart. 

“It’s good you’re going to be there, Harry,” George said after a moment. “We had some great times in that house.

“The Extendable Ears were perfected there,” Ginny said, something too bright in her tone. 

“Exactly,” George said with a half-grin, taking another long sip of whiskey. “There’s always the opportunity for more fun.”

Harry swallowed hard, thinking of the empty dusty rooms, left ravaged from the last Death Eater raid. 

“How will you ever get it all cleaned up, Harry? It’s going to be such an undertaking,” Hermione said. 

He shrugged. “In between training, I reckon. I won’t have much else to do.”

“As long as you don’t hermit yourself in that house,” she said. 

With nothing to say to that, he fell silent as the conversation moved past him, far away. He kept his eyes out onto the distance, everything shapeless in the darkness. He couldn’t see past one day at a time.

*

It was two weeks later, only a few days before training was to begin, when Ginny said, “You ought to practice spells, too.”

Both Ron and Harry looked up from the kitchen table at her. The kitchen was stuffy; August had settled in with a hard heat chokehold, with no relief in sight. 

“Practice?” Harry asked after a moment. 

Ginny raised a brow, her cheeks tinged pink from flying out in the sunshine. “Practical application. They’re going to expect you to use your wands, you know,” she said with a faint smile. 

The tips of Harry’s fingers grew cold. He hadn’t raised his wand against another person since that day in May. “I don’t—”

“Disarming Spells, that sort of thing. We can practice out in the yard,” she said decidedly, standing up from the table and Apparating out of the kitchen with a sharp crack. Since she’d passed her test two days ago, she constantly Apparated, enough so that it drove her mother to distraction. A tribute to Fred and George, she’d said with a wide smile yesterday. It made Harry’s chest ache. 

“She’s got a point,” Ron said quietly; he sounded a bit anxious as well. “C’mon.”

Slowly, as if in water, Harry got up and followed Ron outside. The sun beat down on them, glaringly bright. Ginny stood in the wide open grass, hands on her hips, a white and red image amidst the hard greens and blues of summer. 

“Come on, then. They’ll take the piss out of you for ages if you don’t have the basics,” she said, tilting her head. Her gaze remained on Harry for an extra beat. 

Ron rolled his eyes. “When d’you get so bossy?” he grumbled. 

“About the time I was born into a family of all boys who didn’t know dress robes from denims,” she said tartly, raising her wand.

Harry inhaled a short breath, something acrid stuck in the back of his throat. There was a humming in his ears, a reminder of spells and screams and a hissing voice. 

Ginny broke into his reverie, face drawn in concern. “Put your wand up, Harry.”

Swallowing hard, Harry kept his arm at his side, blinking against the sun. It was a still, breeze-less day, humid enough to suck the breath right from his lungs. Every part of him felt heavy as lead. 

“Harry?” Ron asked quietly. 

Harry stepped back, his wand clutched in his fingers. “I’ve got to go.”

Ginny approached him, eyes shining very brightly. “Harry—“

“Really, I’ve—I’ve forgotten, I’ve got to visit Teddy today—“

“Wait—”

Ron’s words were lost to Harry as he shut his eyes and Apparated away from them, into the cool copse of oak trees outside Andromeda’s cottage. Safely hidden in the shade of the leaves, he leaned against the nearest trunk and breathed out hard, wiping the sweat from his brow. His wand dangled from his fingertips. All the pressure in his chest seemed to collapse and he breathed in at last, shutting his eyes. 

What was the matter with him?

“Harry?”

He looked over at the edge of the tree line. There Andromeda stood, a pram in front of her. She had on a wide-brimmed hat and the pram’s top shaded little Teddy from the sun. “Was I expecting you today?”

Harry straightened up, running a hand through his hair and feeling quite awkward. “No. No, you weren’t.”

Her gaze narrowed on him. “Well, come into the house then. We’ll have lemonade.”

She wheeled the pram around and walked back to the house. Sweat creeping along his neck, Harry followed after a moment, his wand tight in his grip. 

In the front corridor, he shut the door behind him as she took off her hat and hung it on a peg above her coat rack. “Will you take Teddy out of his pram? Go on into the sitting room, I’ll pour us the lemonade.”

Before he could get a word in, she strolled into the kitchen, leaving him alone in the corridor with Teddy. Sighing, he stuck his wand in his back pocket and bent over the pram. “Hey there, Teddy,” he said quietly, lifting the boy into his arms. 

Teddy squirmed for a moment, and then settled against Harry’s chest. His weight was a comfort, his cheek pressed to the hollow of Harry’s shoulder. With his forearm supporting Teddy and his hand flat on his back, Harry walked into the sitting room and sat, feeling incredibly foolish. 

“Here we are,” Andromeda said as she bustled into the sunny room, setting his glass full of pale yellow lemonade on the table next to his sofa. “Would you like me to take him?”

“No, that’s okay,” he said hastily.

She watched him blatantly as she sat across from him. Condensation slipped down her glass as she sipped from it. “To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?”

Mouth dry, he looked down at Teddy’s head, a rash of bright orange today. “I—well—“

“You look tired, Harry.”

He rolled his shoulders back. “Yeah, I’m not sleeping very well most of the time.”

She pursed her lips, watching him silently. Since she’d first broached the subject of _talking to someone_ all those weeks ago, she hadn’t said another word about it. Harry didn’t know what to make of that. Right now, he found it comforting to just hold onto Teddy, who’d found the collar of his shirt quite fascinating. 

“You begin Auror training shortly, don’t you? How is your revising?”

He stiffened, glancing at her. “Fine. I’ve got a handle on mostly everything.”

“And your wand work?” she asked lightly. 

He huffed out a short laugh at that, shaking his head. “We were…we were practicing. I haven’t pointed my wand at another person since—well—and I just froze.”

Her face softened. “That’s quite understandable.”

“It’s not, though. I’m going to be an Auror, I’ve got to be able to cast spells on people. I’ve got to get more sleep, and stop thinking about all those people who died, and I have to get over it and be normal again,” he blurted out, a hot rush of words that spilled from him as the light across the hardwood floor. He flushed, breath stuttering in his chest. 

Teddy fisted his fingers into his shirt, thumping his chest with a soft gurgle. Andromeda sipped her lemonade and set it down next to her. Grey streaks reflected in the dark upsweep of her hair. “I do have to ask, Harry. At what point were you normal?” she asked after a moment.

He blinked, mouth falling slightly agape. “Well—I don’t—“

“You had a strange childhood, I imagine. When you rejoined the wizarding world, your notoriety preceded you. And now for the last seven years you’ve dealt with one event after another, one tragedy after another—where is the normal for you to return to?” she asked gently. 

Harry laughed shortly, dry and without amusement. “So what? Is this is for me, then?”

“Don’t dramatize,” she said, shaking her head. “You’ve just got to stop living like there’s a target on your back. It’ll take some time. You’re not the only one, either.”

Slumping against the back of the sofa, he looked out the window. “I know that,” he mumbled. “I just—I thought it would be easier than this. Isn’t there—isn’t there some spell, something—?”

“Only some things can be cured with a wave of a wand, Harry,” she said firmly. “You may manipulate and control the mind with magic, but you cannot fix the intangible.”

He looked down at his knees, grip on Teddy tightening. “I can’t be crazy.”

“You’re not crazy. Don’t be absurd,” she said. “You’re nowhere near it. You’ve got some things to deal with, that’s all.”

With that, she picked up her lemonade again and took a long swallow. “Drink up. You can put Teddy down for his nap, and we’ll start now.”

His stomach fluttered. “Start what?” he asked, picking up the slippery glass and drinking deeply.

Andromeda smiled, her gaze firm. “Well, we’ll start on making dinner, first of all. I’ll let Molly know you won’t be there.”

*

An hour later, he found himself sitting at Andromeda’s kitchen table snapping the ends off of green beans as she tended to a small chicken, smothering it with lemon and rosemary. He cleared his throat, the kitchen thick with heat. 

“Sorry about the heat,” she said breezily. “I enjoy cooking in the Muggle fashion. Ted was so used to it, even after years in the wizarding world. It’s habit now.”

“It’s fine,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “How did you pick it?” he asked after a moment. 

“Pick what?” she answered distractedly. 

“Working in… you know,” he said awkwardly, his fringe damp with sweat. 

She turned and leveled her gaze at him. “Mental health? Well, you don’t really choose. The supervising Healers observe you in your training, and offer you options based on your skills and what you have an aptitude for.”

“And you had an aptitude for dealing with nutters?” he joked lightly, the beans smooth and waxy under his fingertips.

She raised a brow. “We don’t call them that, but in a sense, yes. I reckon my great experience with my family helped. It’s a grueling process. You study Muggle texts and Magical ones, for really, the issues aren’t different from Muggle to wizard. And I thought, if some members of my family were hell-bent on destroying people, then perhaps I was best served trying to help them instead,” she finished evenly.

Swallowing hard, he nodded and looked off into the near distance. From the kitchen window he could see the sun had begun to sink towards the tree line, the sky still bright blue. 

“Why did you decide to become an Auror?” she asked after a moment. 

Frowning, he glanced down at his little mound of beans, his fingernails scraping against the scuffed wood of the table. “What else was I going to do?”

“That’s not an answer,” she said. “You have quite a talent for Quidditch, for one thing. You certainly did not need to become an Auror. So you must have wanted to.”

He shrugged. “I reckoned it was the right thing to do,” he said quietly. “I wanted to do something that mattered.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with the guilt you’re carrying around, then?” she asked bluntly, her gaze penetrating much like Sirius’s and Bellatrix’s. Sometimes the resemblance between them all was eerie to him. 

_Yes, it does_ , his heart hammered against his ribs. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. “Yeah, probably that too,” he said out loud for the first time since May. Something loosened in his middle just slightly. 

Andromeda sighed. He heard her footsteps on the floor, and opened his eyes to find her standing next to him, a large steel pot in her hands. “As long as you recognize it,” she said gently. “It’s all right, Harry. Now, put the beans in.”

In handfuls, he dropped the beans into the pot. They made a plinking sound against the steel and each other. “Did you recognize it? In yourself?” he asked after a moment, emboldened. 

With the pot resting on her hip and the tendrils of her dark hair around her face, she reminded him more of Molly Weasley than any member of the Black family, the lines of her face relaxed. “Yes, I did. But I made it work for me, and so can you,” she said firmly.

A hard lump settled at the base of his throat, even as he nodded. Just as she turned back to the stove, a small, cooing-sort of wail warbled downstairs to them. “I reckon he’s up,” she said, setting the pot on the stove. 

Harry got up, a nervous fluttering in his toes and fingers. “I’ll get him,” he said quickly, scattering a few stray bean ends across the table with his movement. 

She waved him off, and he took the stairs two at a time, crossing the corridor to the nursery in quiet. There Teddy was, squirming in his cot, his hair tufted and ruffled. The early evening sunlight suffused the room, softening the blues and greens Tonks and Andromeda had used to decorate it. 

“Hey there,” Harry said softly, coming over to the cot. “Nice to see you up.”

He lifted Teddy up into his arms, hitching him against his side. Teddy flattened his hands against Harry’s chest, a few nonsense sounds escaping his throat. With him in his arms, Harry shut his eyes and rested his cheek to the top of Teddy’s now dark hair. 

He could make it work. It was just a matter of how.

*

“We aren’t going to take it easy on you lot,” Auror Jones was saying as she paced in front of the newest group of recruits, her black uniform robes fluttering behind her. She was tall, with broad shoulders and a wide mouth; her dark hair was pulled back tight from her face. “The past few years haven’t been easy on any of us, and while the worst might be over, we’ve got to stay prepared.”

“Constant vigilance,” Ron murmured. 

Next to him, Harry smiled. They stood near the rear of the small group gathered in one of the large open training spaces on the lower floors of the Ministry. There were no windows to let in the late August sun, but Harry could still feel sweat beading along his brow. His wand lay in his hand at his side, motionless and at the ready. 

“Today, we’ll be doing some basic skill testing, including wand work. Don’t be wary or skittish; you won’t hurt us,” Jones said with a quick sharp smile. “Except for maybe Potter in the back, I’m certain I can handle you.”

All eyes skittered towards him for a moment; he flushed, and Ron snorted, nudging him with his elbow. 

“Anyway. Line up, we’ll bring you up one by one, and we’ll see what you’ve got.”

“I’m glad Ginny made us practice,” Ron murmured. “Intense right from the start.”

“Did you expect anything else?” Harry muttered back as they settled into the middle of the pack. 

Immediately, the air flashed with light as spells were traded, back and forth from recruit to instructor. All the muscles in Harry’s body tensed, an unbearable sort of anxiety he’d been trying to breathe through in sparring with Ron and Ginny, and in visits with Andromeda. But now, at the moment when it meant the most, he wasn’t certain he’d be able to work through it. All he could see when he tried to focus were bodies lying in state in the Great Hall; Fred’s lifeless face; George sipping whiskey night after night, stumbling through the world like a man missing a limb. 

It was a smaller than usual recruit class; according to Kingsley, that was due to many people wanting time off and away from memories of the war. They expected a large boom in applications in the coming year, especially from those fresh out of Hogwarts. For now, it was Harry, Ron, and about ten other men and women. Harry recognized some of them from the battle of Hogwarts, but couldn’t place them otherwise. 

“Weasley, step on up.”

Ron left his side, walking straight and tall. Harry glanced down at his feet, inhaling deeply. He thought he could smell the burning of grass and skin, blood slippery under his feet. 

_You’ve just got to stop living like there’s a target on your back._

It was just a job. It was just a spell. He repeated this over and over in his mind, willing the ghosts that haunted him from day to day to either leave him be or give him strength. 

With a thud, Ron hit the floor, groaning just faintly. Rolling to his side, he got to his feet as Jones clapped. “Nice work, Weasley. Now, come on up, Potter.”

The whole room seemed to still. Frowning slightly, Harry gripped his wand and stepped forward. The open space between him and Jones seemed too close, too far. There were no words to distract anyone with this time; he could only rely on his own actions, nothing else. 

Jones raised her wand, brow furrowed. “Ready?”

Inhaling deeply, Harry nodded, raised his wand, and stepped into his future. 

*


End file.
